Why or Why Not X-Cart?

X-Cart is a powerful e-commerce shopping cart platform written in PHP/MYSQL utilizing smarty templates, and contains numerous built-in features. As open source software x-cart can be easily customized to do anything you need by those knowledgeable in software development. X-Cart's robust features in combination with its low price point, make x-cart a great solution for your e-commerce needs.

Before you dive in and establish your x-cart store, we feel it is important to make you aware of x-cart's limitations and inform you how these limitations can be addressed by resources made available by the x-cart community.

Limitation	Solution
X-Cart can be server intensive and doesn't run well on some hosts such as GoDaddy.	Use an x-cart recommended host as listed in our x-cart resources tutorial or run a dedicated server.
X-Cart is based in Russia and the language used in x-cart is not always user friendly.	The languages are stored in variables which can be modified easily using the x-cart admin section.
X-Cart may not work exactly the way you want it out of the box.	There are pre-built x-cart mods available to add additional functionality to your x-cart as well as developers in the x-cart community available for custom development.
The smarty templates require some programming knowledge to be able to properly implement a custom design and often to make necessary changes.	Our x-cart tutorials, the x-cart forum at http://forum.x-cart.com, and other x-cart resources are valuable sources of information to help you understand what is necessary to manage your x-cart.
X-Cart frequently releases upgrade patches.	The upgrade process is not overly difficult once you are familiar with the process, and there are also developers and development firms available to perform upgrades for you.
While x-cart is W3C compliant, it uses tables extensively and doesn't have the cleanest HTML code.	You can modify your x-cart template skin to be more efficient, or install an x-cart template.

To summarize, x-cart is a great e-commerce solution which benefits from a knowledgeable community, x-cart mods and x-cart resources, which address limitations within the stock x-cart. While x-cart comes with a low price point, be sure to leave some room in the budget for further development and x-cart mods to get the most out of your x-cart. Also expect to do some hands-on work or pay somebody else to do so on your behalf.

Authored by Jon Peters, founder of WebsiteCM, specializing in providing X-Cart mods, X-Cart addons and x-cart development services since 2002.

Why or Why Not X-Cart?

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